When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim. This was our first time staying at this hotel in Edmonton (the Hampton); it’s quite new and there was a good deal on rooms. And the pool area was fantastic! There was a little kid splash pool that Gareth enjoyed, a larger pool for swimming and playing volleyball, and a large hot tub. No waterslide, but IMO, if you’re gonna do waterslides in Edmonton, you’re heading to the waterpark at West Edmonton Mall anyways.

We had lots of fun. Gareth created a game he dubbed “Dino Ball”, that if you are familiar with “Calvin Ball” from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, seemed to have the same rules (or lack of them–you just make ‘em up as you go along). There was throwing and catching:

‘alligator wiggling’:

running and kicking (with the occasional ‘hand ball’)

and general chasing around:

Daegan and I spent quite a bit of time in the larger pool too, as he is now able to swim and LOVES to race me:

Gareth still needs to be in parental arms in the deep pool, and loves goofing around (Daegan practicing his back floats behind us):

He also likes practicing his swimming kicks:

Jim preferred the hot tub:

and Daegan joined him from time to time too, clearly enjoying his birthday trip:

After our swim we headed off to Padmanadi, our fave veggie restaurant in Edmonton. The boys drew in their travel journals to pass the time as we were waiting for our food; it was clear the bug class left an impression:

We stuff ourselves silly with delish food, like this kung pao chick’n (wheat gluten based):

And on our way out, who should we bump into but Katie, the instructor from our Insect class, who was having dinner with friends! How odd in a city of a million people, don’t ya think?

Daegan walking and chatting with the instructor Katie as we headed to the greenhouses. We found out that she’s taken all of John Acorn’s classes at the University of Alberta, and as he is one of Daegan’s entomological idols, they found plenty to talk about:

Katie explaining how the butterflies climb out of the boxes behind her once they emerge from their chrysalises:

Looking for butterflies in our favourite butterfly house in Alberta—it’s so lush!:

The class getting our instructions for the scavenger hunt in the arid greenhouse. We were to find tallest cactus, the cactus that looked like a hairy old man, the one of the prettiest flowers, the one that did the best camouflage job, etc.: 

Here’s the smelliest flowers, from the “carrion plant.” By smelling like rotting meat, the flowers attract pollinators like flies. And yes, we all got close and smelled it—once was enough!

We then moved on to the “plants and people” house, which showcases a wide variety of plants humans use for all kinds of purposes, including papyrus, black pepper, mint, banana, and more. There was even a plant that made your hands smell like peanut butter when you rubbed it! (nut allergy-safe!)

They have a stick insect living in this greenhouse, which many of the kids got a chance to hold. Here’s Gareth holding “Georgia”:

We then headed outside to a scrubby meadow, past all the showy flowers, like these lady slipper orchids. BTW, the white stuff on the ground isn’t snow, it’s poplar fluff—yup, not a season goes by without white drifts on the ground in Alberta!

This was the kids’ favourite part of the class—the bug hunt! They had bug nets for all of us, some with shorter handles for kids, some with longer for adults, and off we went to collect bugs. Though no one in the class caught more than a handful, by sending the 20-plus of us out into the meadow, we caught a decent variety and number of bugs. And I did mention Gareth being excited, right?

We caught bugs for a half-hour or so, bringing our nets to Katie who put the bugs into catch-and-release jars for “show and tell” later. We then gathered around and got a mini-lesson on insects and spiders. Here’s Gareth and two other young volunteers demonstrating the characteristics of most insects: 3 body parts, 6 legs, 2 antennae, and 4 wings:

And here’s the characteristics of spiders: 2 body parts and 8 legs:

Katie then showed the class what we caught, and passed around the jars for a closer look. Here’s a Hunt’s bumblebee:

Gareth with caterpillar and then bluet damselfly:

Daegan checking out the entire collection a second time:

Gareth with the butterfly and moth cage, which contained several species. The one in the picture is the Canadian Tiger Swallowtail, one of the most striking large butterflies you’ll find in these parts:

And right at the end as folks were heading off, Gareth found a wolf spider on Katie’s backpack. We learned it was a male wolf spider, which you can tell by looking at its palps (short leg-like/antenae-like things near its face). Male spiders have “boxing gloves” (clubs) on their palps, female spiders have long, smooth palps (“manicured palps”, as Katie put it).

We had a great time at this class, and are headed back for another in the series, on Animals of Alberta in July, and then one on Frogs and Pond Life in August. I’ve got a few more pics of our birthday weekend in Edmonton to share…to be continued tomorrow.

Here’s some photos of our “inside adventures”. Here’s Daegan just outside the interpretive centre:

There are LOTS of hands-on items at the centre, and interactive displays, keeping kids happy:

The welcome sign to the Interpretive Centre, which also functions as a field station for the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Ongoing palaeontology digs and research happen at DPP, and the most recent displays at Tyrrell on ceratopsians (triceratops, styracosaurus and the like) feature new species from DPP found AFTER the birth of my kids! This is a very active field of science where we live, and I am hard-pressed to think of a better place for our boys to grow up, given their interests.

Daegan by one of a handful of large dino skeletons on display:

This bone, which rather reminds me of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, is in fact a vertebra from a quetzalcoatlus, the largest pterosaur species (flying reptile) known. It had a wingspan of 12 metres (almost 40 feet)!

Both Daegan and I found this next display, the “dino diversity wall”, quite interesting. It lists the species so far found in the park, grouped by order / family / genus / species. 42 different species by my count:

As I mentioned, there was far more to the centre than dinosaurs. After walking through a mock palaeontology camp:

you came to a large section that was about the park as it is today. There were many displays on wildlife, one on how hoodoos are formed, some on First Nations Peoples and their views on the badlands, etc. They had a box with the different kinds of sedimentary rocks found in the park for you to touch: sandstone, mudstone, bentonite clay (which is insanely slippery when wet!), etc. But the boys’ favourite display, by far, was the “Badlands Diversity Wall.” It had several 3-sided panels that could be flipped around to reveal information about various lifeforms found in the park (bugs, birds, plants, etc.), and when you let go, it flipped back to the panoramic scene. You can see one of these walls behind Jim and Daegan at this hands-on display (there were two such walls):

Here are the boys turning the panels around seeing / reading about what critter lurked behind:

The boys had me take gajillions of pics as they found some of their favourite animals, bugs and plants, but I’ll just share their two absolute favourites right now. Gareth with the northern scorpion, and Daegan with the prairie rattlesnake:

Gareth just wandered over and insisted I show you the 10-lined June beetle as well:

And here’s one last one of the boys and I goofing around, making T rex claws and roaring at each other. Just adding to the ambiance for the other visitors.

It was a wonderful mini-vacation!

The entrance to the park is quite dramatic. When driving, all of a sudden the prairie drops away, and it is badlands as far as the eye can see:

There is an area to pull off into, and several interpretative signs. Here’s an excited Gareth:

and Daegan at the sign with information about DPP being designated as UNESCO World Heritage site, putting it in the same category as Stonehenge or the Pyramids:

The close-up of the sign reads: Dinosaur Provincial Park, which was nominated by Canada on behalf of Alberta, was placed on the World Heritage List at the 1979 meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee as a site of outstanding universal value forming part of the natural heritage of mankind. Dinosaur Park contains the largest and most comprehensive collection of Upper Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in the world and specimens are on display in major museums everywhere. It also contains excellent examples of badlands and an important riparian ecosystem supporting a wide variety of flora and fauna. [If you visit London’s Natural History Museum, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and countless other museums around the world, you will find many fossils on display are from DPP].

The badlands were carved by the Red Deer River:

and they have signs explaining this process. Here’s Gareth taking a look at the “Birth of the Badlands” display:

It’s hard to give a sense of scale of these lands in pictures, but I thought this photo did a reasonable job. I have labelled some items you can see:

There are just so many interesting ways wind and water have eroded the lands. Here’s the view right beside the interpretive centre:

One of the biggest surprises, to me, was how much wildlife we saw, especially unusual birds like this lark sparrow:

After a long visit at the interpretive centre, we headed on a gravel driving loop that took us to two fossil houses, and 3 trail heads. What is a fossil house? It’s a windowed shelter built over fossils that were found on site and remain in the ground. There are signs and displays, a plasticized book to flip through for more info, and an audio clip by Dr. Phil Currie (Canada’s best-known living palaeontologist) that is played by pushing a button:

There were lots of places to walk around the badlands:

You did have to be careful where you stepped, though—there were cacti everywhere!

Some of the cacti were already in bloom, lending a shocking burst of colour to an otherwise muted landscape:

At the second fossil house, we decided to embark on a hike. This hike has several interpretive signs along the way, and ends at a 1913 fossil quarry. We only made it about halfway, though—in the blazing heat, all of us sweated our bug spray off and were being eaten alive! The badlands trap the heat, and it can be much hotter here than in towns nearby. A temperature of 47C (117F) has been recorded here in the shade!

Jim read the safety warnings about not sticking your hands under rocks or ledges, or into cracks and crevices one more time for the boys. I think the boys were disappointed, but I was quite happy we didn’t see any rattlesnakes, scorpions, or black widow spiders:

The signs were interesting, and covered the earliest fossil finders in this area (The Blackfoot First Nations peoples) to Joseph Tyrrell (after whom the Royal Tyrrell Museum in nearby Drumheller is named) to the “Great Canadian Fossil Rush” of the early 1900s. I’m calling this Daegan’s history curriculum.

We also saw several interesting rock formations, and our minds were running wild with fossils. I dubbed these “stegosaurus rocks”, as they look very much like the plates on a stegosaur’s back to my eye:

Just before heading for home, Jim saw some bones. Not fossils—they’re clearly recent—but it had all of us wondering what creature met its demise in these badlands:

Tomorrow: the interpretive centre at DPP. A lot more than just dinosaurs!      

and stopped at the Alberta Tourist Info Centre at Walsh, just inside the AB / SK border. We’d stopped there on the way out for a bathroom break, and Gareth wanted Jim to see the neat dino stuff they had inside:

I also found a Western Meadowlark getting its dinner on the front lawn:

The next day we did a few activities in “The Hat.” After getting Jim a much needed coffee, we headed to the world’s tallest teepee, but were disappointed to find it cordoned off as they were repainting. (That’s a truck with a huge crane in the pic). The teepee is 20 stories high:

We went for a short walk anyways, checking out groundhogs, bugs, cacti, and birds. I saw and heard the very colourful ring-necked pheasant, but he was too far to get a decent pic, even with the zoom lens. You can see a better pic of one here.

We then headed to the nature centre in Police Point Park. We chatted with the park naturalist, who showed the boys a black widow spider in a small terrarium (black widows, scorpions, and rattlesnakes are found in this SE corner of Alberta), and the boys checked out the current display all about beavers:

We then headed for a long nature walk, via the “Enchanted Forest” and pathway that looped along the river. We saw all kinds of birds, bugs, flowers and other wildlife. All of us found something to enjoy in this outing:

I found a Mountain Cottontail rabbit (also called Nuttall’s cottontail), as well as several birds. I’ve included pics of the Cedar Waxwing and Yellow Warbler, but other sightings included a Gray Catbird, House Wren, flycatcher (unknown species—flycatchers are even harder to sort out than gulls or sparrows!), Common Nighthawk, and Baltimore Oriole:

Jim and the boys found a pair of mating box elder bugs, which obviously made an impression on Daegan, given his later entry in his travel journal:

We then drove on to Brooks, about an hour down the highway, where we were staying as it is the closest town to Dinosaur Provincial Park (more on it tomorrow). I went solo for a short outing to Kinbrook Island Provincial Park, about 15 minutes south of town, as it is supposed to be one of the best birding locations in SE Alberta (and, no surprise, the rest of the family was ‘all birded out’ by this point). I was not disappointed. In my short time there, I saw the reclusive marsh wren, as well as countless other birds, including canvasback ducks and yellow-headed blackbirds:

Tomorrow: the amazing badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park!

The Centre itself is fair-sized building built into the side of a hill above the Frenchman River valley. It is clean, bright, very well laid out and professional. There are detailed displays on a wide variety of prehistoric life forms—it is not just about ‘Scotty’, the T rex found in the Frenchman river valley nearby. (In fact, its not even primarily about Scotty). Many of the displays are hands-on and kid-friendly, and they have other activities for kids you can add on for low cost. Our boys did a fossil dig (cost: $3).

When you arrive at the Centre, you first head to the theatre to see a short film about the discovery of Scotty the T rex. You are then given a guided tour of the museum displays, with a very knowledgeable guide who, in our case, was happy to customize the tour to the boys interests and questions. Even I Jim and I learned new things (more on this in a bit). We will be back! Anyways, let’s get on to some pics, shall we?

The T Rex centre has two parts: the tourism side, which we enjoyed, and the science / palaeontology side of things. I noticed this on a dusty truck in the parking lot:

There were scientists working in the lab that we were able to watch, and they had some of the prepared fossils on display (like Scotty’s actual bones):

The town of Eastend is in a very scenic spot, among an ‘oasis of trees’ in the river valley, surrounded by rolling grassland / scrubland hills and badlands. The drive off the Trans-Canada (from Maple Creek) goes through the eastern edge of the Cypress Hills as well—not your flat ‘boring’ prairie in the SE corner of Saskatchewan! (The Cypress Hills are a heavily treed geological oddity rising above the prairie—in fact they are the highest point of land between the Rocky Mountains and Labrador on the east coast of Canada. They also have unique flora and fauna as they were not covered by glaciers in the last ice age).

Heading into the Centre, which is built into the side of the hill in an aesthetically pleasing manner:

Part of the guided tour:

There are lots of hands-on displays—very kid-friendly:

We brought a picnic lunch, and enjoyed the scenery (reflected in the pic on the mirrored glass). There are bathrooms, a water fountain, and a superb gift shop, but no cafeteria on site. (There are several places to get food in town, a 2 minutes drive down the hill.)

Daegan and Gareth spent some time after lunch scouting for fossils and catching bugs. You get more of a sense of the scenery in these pics. A really lovely spot:

After lunch the boys did a fossil dig activity (Gareth got a bit of help from Jim at the end). I can so see the future here! Daegan found a parasaurolophus skull (model), and Gareth a brachiosaurus:

Before heading on our way, we went back through the displays one more time—the boys and their uber-excitement had settled by then, so Jim and I were able to read and learn rather than dash from one thing to the next with the boys. One of the most interesting things I learned was about how little we know about T rex. Given how popular this dinosaur is, I thought we knew lots and had founds tons of T rex fossils—but not so. Just over 2 dozen T rex fossils have ever been found (world-wide), and the vast majority of these have only small fragments of the skeleton (less than 10% complete). Sue, now at Chicago’s Field Museum, is the best-known among these.  But we know nothing of T rex eggs or young, nor their growth rate or family habits.

Here’s a bunch more pics from the display area. The one of Gareth pointing to the coprolite (fossilized poop) and Daegan wrinkling his nose in the background makes me laugh. Hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect  if you make the trip to Eastend.

Gareth ran off, returning with a brush to “gently remove the overburden Daddy”:

Daegan followed suit, and the boys spent a few minutes removing the sand. Jim helped scoop the sand away into the bowl to contain the mess, and it wasn’t long before some “fossil bones” began to show:

The boys then switched to finer brushes to get into the crevasses to remove as much sand as possible:

And Jim gave it a final rinse in the tub, while the boys looked on:

Here’s the finished product:

Next time, we’ll make the plaster thinner, use a different and less detailed skeleton than the triceratops Daegan chose (the ribs were too fine to see clearly), and Daegan would like to try it with a lighter-coloured sand so as it does not “stain” the final result as much. (Though personally I like the “been in dirt millions of years / weather-beaten” look). It really was a pretty easy project, and at a fraction of the price of the pre-made dino fossil kits. Give it a go!

They also spent some time climbing on the elephants—stone ones, that is.

Fingers crossed, Gareth seems to be doing fine so far. After the homeschool day at the zoo Friday, and playing more outside in the backyard when we got home—it was our first 20C degree day of the year!—he had the worst asthma attack of his life that night. We were maybe 5-10 more minutes from a trip to the hospital when he started improving. Whew!

The whole family headed to the Science Centre this afternoon, the final day before it closes and is dismantled to prepare for the BodyWorlds exhibit. Today was also our last day of “spring break”; we’ll be back into our homeschool routines, with new spring classes starting next week. Here’s a ton of pics from our visit—so many memories, as we’ve brought the boys here countless times over the past 5+ years. Next week I’ll get back to blogging about fun math and science experiments and books; today I just want to dwell on some words of Dr. Seuss:

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

I hope these pictures make you smile too. It should be obvious how much we’ll miss this facility over the next couple years. (Hover your mouse over pics for details):

Making what the kids called a “potato chip” penny. This was part of the “Mr. Roger’s How Things are Made” travelling exhibit:

At this point Daegan and I headed off to watch the Dinosaurs Alive movie in the Discovery Dome, and Gareth and Jim continued exploring.

Over the Easter weekend, we ventured out for a short nature walk to feed the chickadees. Black-capped chickadees are Gareth’s favourite bird, and they LOVE black oil sunflower seeds:

Jim and I got in on the action too:

But it was Daegan, our “nature whisperer”, who got the best results. Despite being nervous at first:

He quickly got the hang of it, and the birds preferred to go to him (perhaps due to his smaller size, yet he was able to stay still—like a tree—more easily than Gareth?):

Daegan even got a red-breasted nuthatch to land on his hand and take a seed, something none of the rest of us managed. It took us by surprise, though, as Daegan simply opened his hand and was getting ready for some chickadees a ways off to notice, when the nuthatch swooped down, grabbed the seed, and took off. I didn’t get a picture. But we did see some other nuthatches. Here’s the much larger white-breasted helping itself to seeds someone had set out in a small, homemade feeder:

By the end of our walk, Daegan had some chickadees so relaxed around him that they hung around on his hand for a bit after eating. Daegan has a gift with nature’s creatures, and has long been drawn to the natural world. He taught himself to read by perusing field guides! Here’s one tame chickadee, in consecutive shots:

If you want to try this, you’ll get best results with black oil sunflower seeds, in the morning, on a cool day. Have fun!